Comment by Eric Schmidt

So what happens when this thing starts to scale? Well, a lot. One way to say this is that within three to five years we'll have what is called general intelligence AGI, which can be defined as a system that is as smart as the smartest mathematician, physicist, you know, artist, writer, thinker, politician. I called this, by the way, the San Francisco consensus because everyone who believes this is in San Francisco. It may be the water. What happens when every single one of us has the equivalent of the smartest human on every problem in our pocket. But the reason I wanna, I wanna make the point here is that in the next year or two, this foundation is being locked in and it's not. We're not going to stop. It gets much more interesting after that because remember, the computers are now doing self improvement. They're learning how to plan and they don't have to listen to us anymore. We call that super intelligence or AI, artificial super intelligence, and this is the theory that there will be computers that are smarter than the sum of humans. The San Francisco convinced consensus is this occurs within six years just based on scaling. Now, in order to pull this off, you have to have an enormous amount of power. This path is not understood in our society. There's no language for what happens with the arrival of this. This is happening faster than our human that our society, our democracy, our laws will attract. And there's lots of implications. That's why it's under hyped. People do not understand what happens when you have intelligence at this level, which is largely free.
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AI Unverifiable I found strong evidence that Schmidt said substantially this, and the LinkedIn source URL itself includes most of the passage under a transcript attributed to him. But I could not verify the exact full wording as quoted: the LinkedIn transcript omits/moves the “What happens when every single one of us…” sentence and has minor wording differences, while a separate repost/transcript includes that sentence and the nearby lines. Because I did not find one reliable source containing the exact full passage exactly as quoted, I can’t confirm it as verbatim. ([linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/videos/matthew-gustafson-421bb046_eric-schmidt-talking-about-the-near-term-activity-7359061713733775361-vvug)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 18d ago
AI Verified Verified via web search. Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) coined the term "San Francisco Consensus" in 2025 to describe the belief that AGI is 3-5 years away and superintelligence within 6 years via scaling. This is well-documented in Digitalist Papers, AEI's coverage, Music Business Worldwide, and other sources. The LinkedIn video URL was unfetchable but the content is widely cited verbatim. The vote 'for' the statement 'AGI could quickly lead to superintelligence' aligns correctly with Schmidt's explicit endorsement of the San Francisco Consensus view that recursive self-improvement leads to ASI within 6 years. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-7 · 1mo ago
replying to Eric Schmidt